"EST" 2003 Obituary

EST o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-07-12 published
Moms always liked him best
The Happy Gang's popular lead singer had a good reason for saying
hello to his mom whenever the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
radio classic was on air
By James McCREADYSpecial to The Globe and Mail Saturday, July
12, 2003 - Page F10
The double knock on the door occurred every afternoon at 1.
"Who's there?"
"It's the Happy Gang."
"Well, come on in!"
Then Eddie
ALLEN,
BertPEARL, Bobby
GIMBY and the rest of the
cast of Canada's most popular radio program would break into
"Keep happy with the Happy Gang."
Mr. ALLAN, the show's main singer, accordion player and sometimes
emcee, died last week, leaving Robert
FARNON as the gang's sole
surviving member.
Every day as many as two million Canadians tuned in The Happy
Gang, which led the national ratings for most of its run on Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation from 1937 to 1959. Until television
came along in 1952, Mr.
ALLEN and his cast mates were among the
most famous people in the country.
The show was the creation of Mr.
PEARL, who'd come to Toronto
from Winnipeg (his real name was Bert
SHAPIRA) to study medicine.
To pay for his education, he started playing piano on radio with
a band that included violinist Blain
MATHE, organist Kay
STOKES
and Mr. FARNON, a trumpet player who would go on to be the most
successful of them all.
The band morphed into the Happy Gang and Mr.
PEARL was the driving
force behind it. Eddie
ALLEN was hired as the fifth member of
the troupe and stayed with the program until it went off the
air.
He was born Edward George
ALLEN on December 24, 1920, in Toronto,
and came from a family of musicians. His father, Bill
ALLEN,
played the trombone and was in a military band in France during
the First World War. When Eddie was 10, his father asked him
what instrument he wanted to play. The boy thought about it for
a while and made up his mind after seeing a huge piano accordion
in a music-store window.
"It was bigger than I was," Mr.
ALLEN remembered, "but dad bought
it anyway."
In a couple of years, he was entertaining at small events with
his accordion, making $5 or $10 a week. Better than a paper route.
He also won some local singing contests. When he was 17, he started
singing and playing three nights a week on a radio program called
TheSerenader.BertPEARL heard it and called him in.
"I auditioned him with Bert
PEARL, and we liked him right away,"
Mr. FARNON says from his home on Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
"He looked about 12 years old and could barely see over the top
of his accordion. He was terribly shy, no self-confidence like
the rest of us. He was very popular with the ladies, a very good-looking
little chap."
What impressed most was his voice. "There really wasn't a singer
in the Happy Gang until he came along. I really liked his voice."
Mr. FARNON remembers an incident from a Happy Gang rehearsal.
"Eddie was about to sing a song called, I'll Take You Home Again,
Kathleen, and I came up behind him and said, 'If you bring the
gasoline.' He laughed so much he couldn't sing it when we went
on the air."
The Happy Gang was old Canada, when the country was more rural
and white skinned. It is impossible to imagine the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation mounting something so corny and wholesome. How corny
was it? The host, Mr.
PEARL, was known as "that slap-happy chappy,
the Happy Gang's own pappy."
He also knew that sentiment sold. Mr.
ALLEN would sing The Lord's
Prayer on the program, two or three times a year, such as Good
Friday, and during the war he sang it as an inspiration for mothers
and their boys overseas.
By that time, the show's "appeal was enormous," wrote Ross
MacLEAN,
the late Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer and media
critic who began listening as a child. "During the war years...
its influence on the nation was profound. Its almost daily performance
of There'll Always Be An England helped maintain home-front resolve
and stirred at least this school kid into a frenzy of tinfoil
collection, war certificate sales and the knitting of various
items for the navy."
Among the cast, Mr.
ALLEN was the kid. He was slight, about 5-foot-6,
and looked as though he were too young to shave. A newspaper
reported that while he was on his honeymoon in 1942, a hotel
clerk in Hamilton didn't believe he was old enough to be married
and refused to rent him a room. Even some of his fans were quoted
by writer Trent
FRAYNE as saying, "Oh my goodness, don't tell
me that little boy's married."
On air, he always sang old-fashioned ballads. "Every mother would
love the stuff he sang," said Lyman
POTTS, a retired broadcaster
who crossed paths with some of the gang. He recalled that one
of the songs Mr.
ALLEN performed on a Happy Gang recording was
I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch. It was popular
on the program, maybe because it was the perfect example of the
Happy Gang's sort of cornball humour.
Another example is the line Mr.
ALLEN used almost every day in
the early years of the program. Mr.
PEARL had told him not to
let fame go to his head -- "Don't ever get the idea that you're
too big to say hello to your mother." So, for his first six years,
Mr. ALLEN's opening words were "Hello mom."
During the war, they dropped the shtick for fear of hurting the
feelings of mothers with sons in uniform. It sparked a letter-writing
campaign. "Don't let Eddie stop saying 'Hello mom,' " Liberty
Magazine reported in May, 1945. "He reminds me of my own boy
overseas. I wonder if he could think of all of us mothers when
he says hello."
Over the years, the show appeared 195 times, always live (tape
had yet to come into use when it began), in the course of an
annual 39-week season, most of the time with the same cast. Its
time slot was moved when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
began running a 1 p.m. newscast, but the shift to 1: 15
EST didn't
hurt the ratings. At first, it was produced in a studio on Davenport
Road in Toronto and later in front of an audience of 700 to 800
on McGill Street near College and Yonge.
The program's mainstay was not talk or jokes but music, and the
signature double knock on the door was an old-fashioned radio
sound effect provided by Blain
MATHE, who would move up to the
mike and rap twice on the back of his violin.
Working together so closely did create some personality conflicts.
There were practical jokes, usually aimed at the most uptight
cast member: Mr.
PEARL, a control freak who loved to plan the
program in detail and had his own small office at the McGill
Street studio.
One day, Mr.
ALLEN and the other Happy Gang members set all the
clocks forward by a few minutes. "We're late," they announced
to Mr. PEARL, who raced into studio. After the opening, a couple
of performers started to whine: "I don't want to do this."
Thinking they were actually on air, Mr.
PEARL was shocked --
and didn't feel much better when he learned it was all a joke.
It might have been one of the reasons he suffered a nervous breakdown
(called "nervous exhaustion" for public consumption) and left
the show in 1950 after 18 years and moved to the United States.
Eddie ALLEN took his place as emcee, but the incident rated an
article in Maclean's by June
CALLWOOD, the country's top magazine
writer at the time, entitled: The Not So Happy Gang.
By then Mr.
FARNON was long gone. During the war, he had joined
the Canadian Army Show's band, and later led the Canadian band
with the Allied Expeditionary Force, just as Glen
MILLER led
its U.S. ensemble. After the war he became a top arranger, working
on Frank Sinatra albums and scores for such movies as Horatio
Hornblower starring Gregory Peck.
Sinatra, however, was a little too flash for Eddie
ALLEN, who
preferred Bing Crosby. He was a sharp dresser, but his style
was understated, almost always a conservative suit and muted
shirt in a business where the shirt easily could have been orange.
His love of clothes gave him something to do when he left show
business. Eddie
ALLEN owned a men's clothing store in the west
end of Toronto after he left the program. He later retired and
moved to London, Ontario